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Introduction

The 28-70mm range is considered by many professional photographers to be the most widely used one on a 35mm film or sensor. Therefore it is not a big surprise that most manufacturers offer lenses in this range for the
professionals as well as for the beginners. Third party companies are not an exception to this rule.
Angenieux is a French firm well known for their high quality motion camera lenses as well as for some important innovations in the optics. In the 1990-ies it tried to enter the photography marked by offering some
very interesting lenses for the main camera body manufacturers: Nikon and Canon. Unfortunately they did not see a future for their efforts and discontinued the production line focusing on motion camera lenses only.
The AF Angenieux 28-70mm f/2.6 was one of the most anticipated Angenieux products but only some 3000 F-mount lenses were produced. I was told that Nikon delivered the electronics for these lenses, so no reverse engineering was
necessary on the Angenieux side. However I was not able to find any confirmation to this online.
Noticeably, the lens has a constant opening aperture at f/2.6 but this is not registered by the two Nikons I tested it on which showed f/2.8 instead.

Even today, using digital equipment, some customers continue to report superb image quality delivered by the Angenieux 28-70mm and some consider it even better than the Nikon flagship lens in this range: Nikkor AF-S 28-70mm
f/2.8D
("The Beast"). This was the reason I decided to buy an Angenieux and am fortunate to have a very well preserved one now.
Soon after I started taking pictures with the lens, I noticed that it delivers somewhat "softy" pictures. I decided to buy The Beast and do this test.